Hard Drive Breakdown

So with all of the new technologies coming out today it’s easy to lose track. We’re here to help and in this post I’ll go over the most common styles of storage drives that can be placed in a computer.

Starting with the oldie but goodie, we have the classic Hard Disk Drive, also known as a HDD. These drives have been around for so long that the technology is almost as good as it’s going to be. The only thing that is being improved upon now is space efficiency. Because of their ease of development HDD are your cheapest storage option. With a 1TB (1000GB) drive costing usually less than $100 depending on your vendor. HDDs come in usually two speeds: 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM. There are 10,000RPM or higher drive speed but these speeds are normally reserved for servers, and not commercial users. These drives tend to last around 5 – 8 years depending on usage. They are the bread and butter of the hard drives and will be around for many more years to come.

Next we have the new kid on the block: the Solid-State Drive, or SSD. These drives have been around for quite some time. However, they’ve only really become affordable in the more recent years. These drive are the Lamborghini’s of the storage media. Extremely fast but not as much trunk space as their more affordable cousins, the HDD. The SSD has slowly been coming down in price making it more common to see in new systems. More commonly you’ll find them in laptop systems where heat management and speed are more of a concern. These drives make booting up your system amazingly fast. A typical system booting Windows 10 from an SSD will boot from power button press to log-in screen in roughly 5-8 seconds. Comparing this to a standard 7,200RPM HDD, you’re looking at anywhere between 2 minutes to 5 minutes depending on the version of your Operating system. So if you’re looking for a high performance drive, and not concerned about storage space look no further than a SSD for your next system.

The final drive type we’ll talk about are the Solid-State Hybrid Drives, or SSHDs. These drives, just as the name suggests are a mix of Hard Drives and SSDs. With SSHDs you sacrifice a little of the SSDs speed for a massive amount of storage of the HDD, for about 25 – 50% the cost of a similar size SSD. How SSHDs work is they “learn” what files are used most and places them in the SSD portion of the SSHD. This allows those files to load much faster. These files typically tend to be your OS files and maybe one or two programs that you use the most. These drives are typically used for those wanting to upgrade their systems but just don’t have the budget for a SSD that meets their storage needs.

Hopefully this clears up a little of the mysteries related to hard drives. If you’re looking to upgrade your system or your system just isn’t moving along like it used to; give us a call and we’ll get you taken care of. We are your Austin Area Computer Repair and Service company.

Frankenstein Computers has been taking care of our happy clients since 1999. We specialize in IT Support, IT Service, MAC repair, PC Repair, Virus Removal, and much more.